Brief Report: Seeing the Man in the Moon: Do Children with Autism Perceive Pareidolic Faces? A Pilot Study.

Adams et al. (2016) showed kids photos of clouds, toast, and tree bark that secretly held face shapes. They asked children to point out any faces they saw.

The team tested autistic and typically developing kids side by side. No teaching or rewards were given; they just wanted to see who noticed the hidden faces on their own.

Autistic children spotted fewer make-believe faces than their peers. The difference was large enough to be obvious without counting every child.

This tells us they are less pulled toward face-like patterns in everyday scenes.

Anthony et al. (2020) used eye-tracking and found the same group difference: autistic kids split their gaze evenly between toys and real faces, while typical kids looked mostly at faces. Together, the two studies show the attention gap holds for both natural photos and lab arrays.

Cohrs et al. (2017) moved from still pictures to short videos of kids playing. They also saw autistic youth looking away from social action, linking the early face-finding problem to later social skills.

Bradshaw et al. (2011) tested preschoolers with a simple face-memory game and found autistic toddlers already struggled. Christian’s pareidolia task now shows the weakness can be caught even without direct testing—just by watching what kids notice in the world.

You can use pareidolia images as a quick, no-equipment probe during intake or play. If a child rarely points out the man in the moon or faces in carpet patterns, flag it as a possible early sign of reduced social attention. Pair this observation with direct eye-tracking or social skills checklists to build a fuller picture and to shape goals that draw the child’s gaze toward people, not just objects.